World News - Korean Police Block Protesters on Way to Rally Over U.S. Base

About 4,000 South Korean protesters were prevented from proceeding to a rally by riot police in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, amid concern the demonstrations against the relocation of the U.S. military headquarters may turn violent and will harm relations between the two countries. About 19,000 riot police officers wielding batons and shields prevented the protesters, including farmers, students and labor union members, from accessing the site where demonstrators had planned to begin their rally at 10 a.m. Korea time in Pyeongtaek, 65 kilometers south of Seoul, an organizer and police said. ``We demand the government stop construction of the new base in the city, and map out the project from the beginning,'' You Young Jae, a spokesman of Pan-South Korean Solution Committee Against U.S. base extension in Pyeongtaek, said today in a phone interview. ``The government should scrap its earlier assignment of defense facility areas in the rice-farming city.'' No one was injured ... http://quote.bloomberg.com

Israel's High Court on Sunday narrowly upheld a law that denies Israeli residency to many Palestinians who marry Israelis, rejecting appeals against a statute critics say violates human rights and is racist. The restrictions, an amendment to Israel's Citizenship Law, affect thousands of Palestinian and Israeli Arab couples. Marriages between Palestinians and Israeli Jews are rare. "The Palestinian Authority is an enemy government, a government that wants to destroy the (Jewish) state and is not willing to recognize Israel," Justice Michel Cheshin said in support of the 6-5 ruling against the appeals. In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Aharon Barak said the amendment violated civil rights. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1960182

A string of deadly attacks ripped through the Iraqi capital Sunday, killing at least 26 people and wounding nearly 70, police said. Six small Shiite shrines also were damaged in a series of blasts around Baqouba, a mixed Sunni Arab-Shiite region where sectarian tensions are running high. Other attacks elsewhere in Iraq killed 15 people, including two British soldiers who were killed in a roadside bombing Saturday night. Baghdad's deadliest attack Sunday involved two suicide car bombs that exploded near a main checkpoint on a four-lane road leading to the international airport, killing at least 14 Iraqis and wounding six. The other 12 Iraqis were killed by four roadside bombs, three targeting Iraqi police patrols and one that exploded in an open market. The surge of violence occurred as Iraq's parliament met in Baghdad, and Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki met privately with politicians to try to ...http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-05-14-shrine-bombs_x.htm?csp=34&ord=6

The U.S. prosecutor in the CIA leak case has told a court he plans to use as evidence a newspaper article with notes that he says were hand-written by Vice President Dick Cheney referring to Valerie Plame shortly before she was exposed as a CIA operative. The notes show Cheney and his former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were "acutely focused" on the July 6, 2003, article written by Plame's husband, Bush administration critic and former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, said Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the pre-trial filing made on Friday.A Cheney spokeswoman said the matter is a court proceeding and referred a request for comment to Fitzgerald's office.Fitzgerald said the notes show that Cheney and Libby were focused on Wilson and "on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions."...http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060514/ts_nm/bush_leak_cheney_dc

Abbigail and Isabelle Carlsen remained in intensive care under sedation Saturday, one day after doctors spent nearly seven hours in surgery separating the conjoined twins.The 5-month-old girls were breathing with the assistance of ventilators "after an uneventful night," according to a statement released by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.The sisters, who spent their first months with their noses just inches apart, were recovering in separate beds."We've had our prayers answered up to now," the girls' parents, Amy and Jesse Carlsen, wrote in a message posted Saturday on the family's Web journal. "And we will continue to pray for a perfect recovery."When the girls were born Nov. 29 to the Fargo, N.D., couple, they were joined at the diaphragm, pancreas and liver, and shared a common bile duct and part of an intestine.A 70-member Mayo Clinic team has cared for the twins since Feb. 24. ...http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-05-13-conjoined-twins_x.htm?csp=34&ord=1

The last time the U.S. military posted troops on the border near this tiny cluster of farms and ranches, an 18-year-old goat herder was shot to death. Hardly a day passes that Esequiel Hernandez Jr.'s family and neighbors don't think of May 20, 1997, the day a Marine corporal shot and killed him. With President Bush considering plans to deploy National Guard troops along the Mexican border, Hernandez's family is worried that other border residents or even his nephews, who tend goats along the same rugged West Texas desert where he was killed, could be the next victims. "There was no motive for them to (shoot) Esequiel and I worry that the same thing could happen, or worse," his grandfather, 79-year-old Valerio Pando, said in Spanish. It is widely speculated that President Bush will unveil a plan to send troops to the border during a Monday night speech about immigration reform. Details of the plan are unclear but ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1959411